


death made him a stranger

by rooftoplights



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Eventual Katara/Zuko (Avatar), F/M, Reincarnation, Zuko (Avatar)-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25536481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rooftoplights/pseuds/rooftoplights
Summary: Five people Zuko should have loved, and the one he did.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 112
Collections: Zutara Week 2020





	1. i'd chase you up the hill

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Zutara Week 2020.
> 
> Title is from the play Electra by Sophocles. Chapter titles are lyrics taken from the song [All I've Ever Known](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPjqWwkAymg) by Bahamas.

* * *

_"Besides, with love one can live even without happiness. Even in sorrow, life is sweet._ "

  
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, _Notes from Underground_

* * *

**I. Ozai**

His mother told him when he was little, perched upon her knee, fragile and gentle as a doll, that if only he reached inside himself, he would be able to save the world. He would be able to save himself, too.

His father told him when he was little, shoulders tight and arms plastered to his small frame, braver than he could ever dream of being in the face of a man who never smiled, that if only he could find the fire within his veins to burn the palace to the ground, he would be able to burn the world too. He would be able to balance the weight of the disintegrated ash in one palm and gaze upon a horizon that could no longer fight back.

Zuko kept these lessons within the folds of his robes. He secured them in the strands of hair that grazed his head as they clung together to form top knots he wished were tight enough to seal his fate. He did not forget them, but it was not until much later that he understood them.

There was a difference, he learned, between remembering and recreating. A difference between weakness and strength, fire and water, worth and love, madness and balance.

..

In his first life, the life that dawned the bleakest sunrise mankind would ever witness, he was killed by his father. It was not a painless death, nor a vain one. It was simply a death; the first among many others, the precursor to the succession of somewhat happier lives he would end up leading, a death that told him of death and nothing else. A mere solitary window in which he sought to understand the kind of fate that had been woven into his blood and bones.

..

His mother called to him one sad evening, her voice a tattered ruins of something akin to regret. There was no fear in her eyes when she gazed upon him. Her hands were clasped neatly together in her lap, and it seemed to occur to her suddenly that he was only twelve.

She swept a hand across his unmarred cheek, and told him in a voice that calmed his soul like the waves do against bruised sand, that she was leaving. Her hair fell into her pale face, undone and unbidden, like the departure that had been hastily wrought upon her as punishment.

"I will always love you," she said quietly into the air. She did not shake or sob. Her features were carved so carefully they might as well have been stone.

He wanted to grasp the words and the air and trap them all in a jar, as if they were fireflies that deserved to be suffocated before the light went out. He tried, raising one hand and cupping it against the wind. When he brought it back down to earth to show her, opened the cage as if he were the ringmaster of a circus, there was nothing. Only a glimpse of hope.

If you loved me, you would not go, he wanted to tell her. If you loved me, you would tell me why. If you loved me, you would take me with you. But he did not say any of those things.

He nodded, head bobbing up and down, and shook her hand like his uncle taught him to, and stood remarkably still like his father would have wanted, as he watched her leave.

Zuko at twelve was the culmination of teachings without notes, guidebooks addressed to everyone but him. He was, in essence, a shadow cut from glass.

..

After that, it was just him and Azula. His father was preoccupied in taking Azulon's place, seating himself on a throne he had thirsted after since the day he was born and still did not possess, while Iroh made war with his son by his side. Not much time passed until it was only him.

Azula died in her fourteenth year.

Lo and Li sat him down in his over-large room in Ember Island and said she drowned.

It was a very difficult truth for him to believe. Azula did not drown. If anything, Azula blistered the waves with lightning until they jerked to her purpose. Azula was too strong to let saltwater fill her lungs, too fierce to endure the press of the noose against her neck. Azula was too much alive to be dead.

And yet she was.

His father returned to Ember Island for the first time in seven years to study her bloated body himself. Zuko found it inappropriately funny that only death could bring his family together.

Ozai's gold eyes glittered when they left the only child he had had, no wince or frown or despair curled upon his unforgiving lips, and fell upon the son he had always wished to never have been born.

"Throw her back into the ocean," he commanded. The men around him did not comprehend what he meant. Zuko did. Zuko inhaled the clear meaning and the wasted scent of decaying flesh and let it roil in the depths of his stomach. When he keeled over and stared the upset in the face, he heard the heavy tread of his father behind him.

When he turned to face him, he braced himself for anything but, "I know you killed her."

A quiet fury seethed beneath the surface of the accusation his father wielded against him.

Ozai glanced back at Azula, expression blank. "Even the weak can take life," he observed, almost reflectively, almost to himself.

He did not stay a moment longer, crimson cloak sweeping and dark hair fanning the expanse of his broad back, as Zuko emptied more of the nothingness into the sea. Eventually a collection of white limbs joined him, and he watched fascinated, as the remnants of the sister who had tormented him with her talent, destroyed him with her precision, and earned the love he had so desperately wanted from their father, floated farther and farther away until she was simply part of the sunlight that sparkled upon the surface of the water.

Even in death, she shined.

..

He was invited to war meetings when he turned seventeen.

The darkness of the council room shrouded him in enough cover to mask the terror that pierced his insides and fumbled in the back of his throat each time he found himself beside his father. A year had crept by and Ozai showed no signs of a planned retribution, no revenge for the death of the only child he believed was worthy.

Zuko sat and shut his mouth. He winced and sometimes glared. When he felt particularly bold, he drummed his fingers against the paneled wood and voiced his disagreement for only himself to hear, burrowed deep within the confines of his mind.

His father was waiting for a mistake, but Zuko would not give him one.

That became its own mistake.

..

The war in Ba Sing Se was drawing to a close and the Air Nomads had been wiped out many lifetimes before. The Earth Kingdom stood atop rubble and the mass grave of bodies, coiling around itself in so tense a fashion in order to hide the beginning threads of inner turmoil that feathered into wider and deeper cracks.

It was almost a mirror of himself. But Zuko did not realize this at the time.

His uncle was at the forefront of the walls of a city that did not crumble when his father began to challenge him into sparring. It was a steady weight that began to accumulate. With each battle lost — and there were no battles won — he earned himself a new burn, a new scar, a new lesson his body refused to emulate.

The healers did not know what to do with the constellation of open wounds that were shattered across his frame. They slathered ointments that made his skin itch, force-fed him poisons that they claimed would mend the skin back together again even as his heart grew weaker and he found it increasingly difficult to speak.

Often, they merely let his pain burn through him, as if it were a star shot straight through his heart, waiting until his spine arched and collapsed into the bed, silk already crimson so it would no longer need to be washed.

..

His uncle made one trip back to the palace before his own death.

Lu Ten had died, as Azula had; as children, as innocents who had never known innocence.

Zuko wondered if this was another way in which luck had failed him.

Iroh took in the incinerated tapestry of a nephew he had been too distracted to love and cried. It was an odd gesture for Zuko to witness, a pain that someone else was shouldering for him. The foreign taste of it was oddly sweet on his tongue before it spilled bitter down his throat.

Why weren't you here? He wanted to scream. Why didn't you protect me? Why are you just as _she_ was?

He did not say any of those things. He comforted his uncle by reassuring him he was fine, like his mother would have told him to do, and asked him to stop crying because it was unbecoming and weak, like his sister would have said if she had been alive and in his place.

Zuko at seventeen was a dying ember still clinging to life in the hopes that one day he would muster up the courage to crush the flame out himself, a boy in the charmless limbo between hell and hell. He was, in essence, nothing but a trick on the wall.

..

Iroh ordered a waterbender healer be brought into his service, and the Northern Water Tribe, afraid of Fire Nation retaliation if they did not comply, sacrificed the one who was not their own. She was a small girl, blue eyes wide and defiant, a refugee from the South Pole. Her hands were more suited to channeling anger than softness.

His uncle took her in anyway and let the Northern Water Tribe be. He did not dress her in red and gold, and he did not tell her why the boy who seemed on his deathbed after each collision of fire was so important to be kept breathing.

For her part, she did not ask questions she knew would not garner answers.

She sat beside the Crown Prince and healed him as best she could.

Zuko did not make sense of the blue fabric that met his eyes when he awoke, nor the dark skin that lingered above his wounds when a fresh onslaught of pain overtook him and then subsided. But he watched her through lidded eyes, and did not push her away despite the protests that curled inside him. A nameless girl could do no more harm than what had already been done.

When she was around him, he wished he could feel the cold.

..

His final moments were spent on the ground, looking up.

He had finally done it. He had advanced through winces and glares, through the silent protestations he made for no one's pleasure — not even his — and waited as the challenge escaped from the jail cell that was his body.

It was a plan he had heard numerous times before, an injustice that soured and wept as he tried his hardest to ignore it. He did not know why he broke his vigil, why he stared at the offending general in horror and openly disagreed with him. He simply did.

His father rose up like a storm that had been brewing in the sky for so long it had gathered all the mist and power from the clouds around it, not noticing that the dead cannot help the living once they have been exhausted the first time, and beat down upon him without mercy.

A new scar was emblazoned on his face to coordinate with all the rest, and the last thing he saw before it was all gone was the flaming, weeping painting of his own cowardice.

..

Perhaps he should have loved him.

Would it have made a difference?

Zuko had never been taught the right way to love a monster.

**II. Ursa**

His second life was happier than his first. But it was not much beyond that.

In fact, if there was anything Zuko learned from his second life, it was that happiness was far more unbearable than any pain.

..

He was born into purpled sunsets and the sound of the ocean following him wherever he went. Ursa had brought him here as an infant, swaddled him in crimson and gold, bearing him away as if he were a leaf lost in the wind.

It was the kind of peace that took time to adjust to, the kind of peace that always felt too much like complacency; too much like a lie.

He did not understand a father besides Ikem, nor a sister besides Kiyi. Ozai and Azula were faint, indistinguishable remnants of some past he had never reconciled with in his mind. If he felt his heart tug each time he thought of a family beyond what he had come to know, he ignored it with as much determination as he did in all things.

His life was normal, in a plain and blatant way. It was the kind of life he understood others had come to content themselves with; a humble life that led to a humble death, all in the same town, speaking the same language, with the same people.

In the mornings he helped Ikem to till the fields, the sun incessant on his back and sweat pooling into his burnt skin. They would take the dried peppers, always bright red and gleaming, and sell them at the village market. Zuko would stand until he could no longer, smiling at the shriveled old men who gave him grunts of approval and acceptance as they inspected the fruits of his toil in their wizened hands; at the young children as they laughed and chased each other around the square with an innocence he now comprehended. Sometimes he would even catch a smile sent his way from girls who giggled as he swept by and ducked their heads when he turned to face them.

A peasant life for a crown prince. A happy life perhaps, for someone other than him.

Sometimes, after his mother and Ikem and Kiyi had all vanished into the night, he would climb up to the roof and stare at the stars. There was always that conviction that something was missing; some inevitable, important, unforgettable element of what he was living that he was not fulfilling. The moon seemed to know this too, and she kept him company where no one else had before.

Ursa did not tell him of the war, or the Fire Lord, or the death that reigned supreme as annihilation crept closer. She did not tell him of the life he could have led if he had been Fire Lord instead of his father. She never told him anything at all.

And he realized, belatedly, when it was certainly too late, that perhaps that had been her undoing and not his.

..

The first time he heard the name Ozai was when he was nine; a tremble of his limbs shaking him to his core, at a loss as to why he felt such a strange sense of dread.

Normally, his mother would see him off to bed, hands soft and warm as she assured him of what a better day tomorrow would be. She would press her lips to his forehead, brush aside the dark hair that dusted against her gentle fingertips, and smile. It was a lovely smile, the kind that even monsters could find it in themselves to love.

Tonight, however, she disappeared even before Kiyi had wandered off to sleep, and Zuko had gone looking for her in vain. His feet padded against the dry floors and there was an enduring sleepiness that crawled up his spine and threatened to weigh upon his eyelids.

He wandered around the house for what felt like hours, peeking into rooms he had never thought to enter, shaking his head as the spaces filled with an interminable emptiness. Just as a hollowness began to plant itself in his chest, he heard his mother’s voice from the farthest room.

It was uncharacteristically panicked, a frantic fear coloring her vowels and sharpening her consonants. Each word was calibrated with a kind of harshness he had never heard before. And then that name, _Ozai_ , shattered into the drained void of silence and evening, and Zuko froze.

He burst into the room without thinking, not bothering to notice Ikem pacing near the frame of a window, or his mother as a sudden horror flickered to life in her eyes. “Who’s Ozai?”

She waved him off, as if he could not see how her hands shook and her skin paled. “No one,” she soothed him, voice too flat for him to believe. “No one at all.” She cast a surreptitious glance at her husband before turning to look at Zuko once again.

“Go to sleep, darling.” She paused, golden gaze questioning. “I’ll walk you to your room, if you want. The evening is time for sleep. I’ve told you how important sleep is, haven’t I?”

He nodded without understanding why. He followed her without complaint, and when she pulled the sheets tight against his growing body he let himself succumb to sleep without a second thought.

..

That was when the dreams began.

..

At first, they were relatively tame. Aristocratic features too much like his own etched in flames. A curl of a man’s lip as he sneered over a forest fire. A perfect picture of a girl dancing in the sunlight, each movement exactly as it must have been intended.

He woke from these dreams with a sense of familiarity lingering on his chapped lips.

By the time he went back to sleep, the feelings were forgotten, lost to the whirlwind of his own confusion.

But they would start up again just as brilliantly, with as much vividness as the way in which he could paint his mother’s face from memory.

And with them came the fevers.

..

The fevers were always burning.

They swept through him as if he were splintered wood, each spark setting alight on every jagged edge he had torn off from his first life. They enveloped him in a blazing heat and it took his mother and Ikem to drag him from those momentary gaps in consciousness with cool water at their beckon and panic in their frenzy of recovering him.

Their fear pierced him so suddenly he would awake. They kept him up for as long as they could, trying all sorts of methods they devised up or learned from famous healers. They made him visit faraway towns, fed him stalks of green and brown dust as if that would ease away his ailment.

It never did.

..

His uncle Iroh came to visit them the summer of his eleventh year. His face had crinkled into a map of fine lines and kindness and his hands were calm and steady as he pressed a hand to his nephew’s face.

Through closed eyes, Zuko heard all.

“Have you ever wondered if this is not a physical pain?”

His mother sounded baffled as she replied, “Of course not. How else would such a reaction occur?”

Iroh was smiling, Zuko could feel it creep into his words. “The mental can well become the physical with enough energy.”

“Ursa,” there was a moment of quiet, “you must let him go.”

“ _No.”_ Zuko’s eyes shot wide open. His mother stood before him, swaying as if she might fall any moment and disappear into the ground. As if she had never existed at all.

Iroh caught her with a hand upon her back. “There will be no other right time,” he said sympathetically. His voice was tinged with sorrow. There were many seasons in that sorrow, many winters and springs that spilled into the desperate crevice of a lost family.

At that, Ursa collapsed into his uncle’s embrace and Zuko witnessed his mother sob for the first time.

“You cannot, _you cannot_ ,” she repeated, hysteria distorting her features into a ruined misfortune of all the broken promises she could not keep. “He’s my only son,” she pleaded, “my first child. He is only a boy,” she clung to Iroh and did not let go. “He is only a boy. How can he know? How can he know—of anything?” Her lips were stretched tight across her mouth, fear coloring them white. “Let me keep him safe,” she implored, “let me keep my child safe.”

Iroh fell back. “That is not your decision to make,” he murmured. Tears clutched for purchase in the layers of skin around his sad eyes. “That is his.”

..

And that was how the story was told; one fever that unraveled them all.

He was Zuko, Crown Prince of the Fire Nation, son of Ozai and Ursa, half brother to Azula. Firebending was in his blood. The kindly uncle who visited them every few years was not some distant relative but brother to his _real_ father, one of the most powerful firebenders in the world. There was a war going on, and they were winning. They were also losing.

It was as if the ocean in his mind had roared to life and now he was drowning in the screams of the people who had been swept away, riding atop waves and seeing their rusted homes fade in the distance.

He was too shocked to feel any sort of anger at his mother, though her presence now made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. Every time he met her worried gaze, he would feel a sense of fear, wondering what other lies she hid beneath her red silk, what truths she distorted in the lines of her hands.

When she reached for him, he flinched. When she spoke to him, he shuddered. When hurt marred her features, he trembled. The resentment grew, little by little, until it was such a gaping wound his entire life could fit through it.

Flinches turned to revulsion, shudders to fury, trembles to indignation.

And then: “You are not my mother.”

..

He left on the eve of the start to the Fire Days Festival, kissing Kiyi goodbye as she slept. She was the only innocent in this house, the only innocent except for him. And now he would be gone.

(Forever?)

His fever dissipated into the balmy air the farther he got from the familiar ridges and angles that had sheltered him since he was a child. Now that the sun strayed higher and higher above the rooftop he had come to love as an extension of himself, the warmth of his own body began to subside, to melt into the heat that surrounded him.

He was burning yes, but now he was alive. He had never felt this way before. What was comfort to a Crown Prince? What was comfort to someone like Zuko?

He did not know. But perhaps he would find out, on this great adventure he had come to realize was the true beginning.

..

It was not.

The ship he boarded with the fare his uncle Iroh had left him before he was gone wasted away in the darkened depths of the sea. Beside it, the dark hair and sunken skin of a boy not yet twelve was flung this way and that; sometimes against a rock grown green with algae, sometimes against the meaningless water of the waves, sometimes against the boy’s fellow passenger, a small girl in blue.

If his mother searched far and wide for her lost son, she never found him.

..

Perhaps he should have loved her.

Would it have made a difference?

Zuko had never been taught the right way to love a liar.

**III. Azula**

If there was one thing Zuko would remember from his third life, it would simply be this: Azula’s birth.

It was a horrendous event, full of screams and wailing and the taste of iron in the back of his mouth from biting his lip too hard. He was two years old, and it was the most fear he had ever felt. His father was a fearsome sight, and his mother was wracked with sobs and aches and dried tears that never fully left her weathered eyes; gold dimmed, until it was only a shadow of the sun.

Azula arose from all the circumstance and pomp and disgrace, red face contorted and flames dancing beneath her stubby fingers. When she opened her eyes, there were shades of gold Zuko had not known could exist. Gold tinged with blue, gold tinged with power.

He stumbled back in surprise, and out of the swathes of ivory on crimson on obsidian, Azula grinned.

..

She bested him in everything. To their father, it was no exaggeration.

Firebending came first, but she was always quicker, smarter, more astute than any Crown Prince. She grasped political concepts with startling ease, understood all that was left unsaid at a war council, could decipher each and every reason for why one of their ancestors had succeeded in conquering some nation or why they had lost.

To put it simply, she knew what would happen before it did. And with it was always that larger than life confidence, the arrogance that was founded on so much more than any poet or playwright could imitate.

If he had been a lesser man, perhaps he would have resented her for it. But all Zuko could do was watch and wonder where this hole of his heart came into play; how this poison-tipped arrow that stung in the soft flesh around his lungs would ever compete with her everlasting brilliance.

Sometimes, he wished he had never been born.

He never told Ursa that, and she never told him that sometimes she wished such a fate for Azula instead.

..

Azula grew up more rapidly than childhood could ever comprehend, as if all the simple and lost years of her youth could only crane its head up in order to try and find her face against the sun.

Before Zuko turned fourteen, she was sixteen. Before he reached eighteen, she was essentially twenty. She touched the stars too soon, and she didn’t know where to stop. Azula simply didn’t _understand_ what the stars even looked like, only felt them in her hands and convinced herself that _this_ was it. This was the final hurdle, the final block.

And then she found one more beyond it. She insisted she must have that one too.

..

There was a tale that his mother told him when he was a child, of a farmer who fell in love with the moon.

The farmer was poor; not only in possessions, but in spirit as well. He had lost his way as a young boy and had never discovered an alternative path, or a way out of his town. He began to find companionship in the moon until he would spend his waking hours at night and sleep under the sun’s disapproving gaze.

The sun warned the farmer against relations with the moon. It was unnatural, the sun claimed. The moon was not meant to be indulged in. The moon was most beautiful when it was only spared momentary glimpses; when the beauty of it would never fade into commonality.

The farmer did not listen. Instead, he sought out the moon with more fervor and more anger. His love for the moon had become only an echo of his hatred for the sun.

The moon knew this and was hurt. When the farmer reappeared at the beginning of each sunset, the moon sought refuge elsewhere. It fell from the sky and into the surface of the water. There, it could only be appreciated if the farmer knew the moon well enough to look.

The farmer did not. The farmer had forgotten what the moon had been without the sun. The moon wept, but her tears only melted into the water.

The pool had become the moon’s haven and her grave.

The farmer searched until his limbs grew weary. His dreams no longer burned. They froze.

..

His mother told the tale often, but as a child Zuko’s interest wavered. He did not concern himself with the nuances of the farmer and the sun and the moon. It was Azula that garnered the focus of his attention, that marred his mother’s weaving of the story.

“How is Azula so powerful?” he asked her instead. He almost added: _how is she so much better than me?_ But at the last moment, he lost face and let the question hang in the humid air alone. Another weakness, perhaps. There was all the reason before him, and yet he still hungered after an answer. Azula would have seen it straight away, narrowing her entire vision to just that one red dot.

Ursa’s eyes darkened and something unreadable lingered in their depths. “You do not want to be like Azula, Zuko,” she murmured. Her voice was almost cold, devoid of the usual warmth that tinged every comfort she gave him when they spoke.

_Why not_ , he had whined, petulant and all of ten years old. She had only stared at him in reply. Then, distantly: “She is full of rage, my love. Too much rage, too much anger.”

“But why?” He cocked his head with wide eyes. He did not understand. What could Azula possibly be angry about? The other children their age played about as though the world was theirs for taking. For Azula, it _was_.

And yet.

“I don’t know, darling.” His mother looked mournful, grief-stricken. “I don’t know at all.”

“But you should,” he argued, “you’re our mother.”

Ursa swept her gaze down to her perfectly clasped hands. When she raised her head, tears shone unbidden beneath her eyelashes. “Yes,” she said, “I should know. I am her mother.”

Her title shook like a leaf in the wind, hurled against each tide with a kind of anguished ferocity; a curse, a lament, an epic poem that would always end the same way no matter how terribly it hurt.

..

The day before her seventeenth birthday, he mustered up enough bravery and asked her. “What are you so angry about?”

She looked over at him from her place before the mirror, letting her quick fingers tie the loose strands of dark hair into a crisp knot. Faint amusement lingered in her knife-like smile, but she played dumb. “What do you mean Zuzu?”

He flinched, as he always did when she called him that. “Where does all that rage come from? All that power?”

The corners of her lips curled downwards. “From me, of course,” she said. “Who else?”

He shook his head, and tried not to cower from her glare. “But—”

Azula leaned forward, letting blue electricity spark from her palms as she moved to directly confront him. He had six inches on her. It did not make a difference. “Sometimes,” she began softly, “some people are just born _wrong_. Like they need something other than themselves to accomplish anything.” Her face contorted into an arrogant sneer. “Like you. _Weak_.”

“And how do I stop being weak?” The desperation in his voice was a shameful taint, a flaw worth disguising. A flaw he simply did not know how to disguise. How could he? No one had ever taught him.

She stepped back and tilted her head, studying him for a long moment. Then, clucking her tongue, she said admonishingly, “You never learn Zuzu.” There was a flash of something akin to disappointment in her eyes before it vanished. “Perhaps that is why Father has always hated you.”

..

It was some version of the truth. In fact, if Zuko remembered correctly, truly shut his eyes and tried to think, he would know that that was the only time Azula had not lied. And if he had been wiser, older, and less afraid, he would have known that Azula never lied. At least, not in the way he thought she did.

His father died a year later, flung off the balcony of the Fire Lord’s suite. There was a knife found embedded deep in between his ribs, buried to the hilt in blood. When a guard pulled the silver blade free, Zuko wondered dimly if he would ever meet his end in a similar way. If his story would end like his father’s; dead and dying, no murderer to be found.

Azula shut herself in her room for months.

The council was fraught with chaos, aristocrats and officials playing their cards against their enemies, allowing the tension to fester until no one knew who would succeed such a figure as Ozai. Who would even dare. Some pleaded for Iroh to return, while others looked to Azula, even as she decayed beneath the sunless walls that threatened to close her in. People were always looking to Azula, it seemed.

They would look to her even in death, as the world burned.

And Zuko did know how to feel disappointed that he was only seen as a liability, an afterthought. After all, his sister was the one who could conquer nations, who could bring prideful men to their knees. Azula had a _vision_ , where Zuko could only make out the indistinct line of a phantom dream.

..

When she finally rose from the cellar that was her lavishly furnished room, it was to chill the blood in his veins with fire.

A door that swung open as if unhinged, and there she was. She had not bothered to change her clothes, and her hair separated into greasy, unwashed strands beside her sallow skin. Her characteristic smirk was gone, and in its place was only an absence of feeling. Emptiness and nothing else.

She planted herself on his bed, and said shortly without introduction, “Mother killed our father.” She picked at her long fingernails, the ends bitten away. “I thought you should know.”

He gaped at her for a long moment, hands frozen in place. “You—” he shook his head. “You’re insane. You’ve truly lost it, Azula. How… how can you say _that_?”

She laughed, the bitterness seeping into the air until Zuko felt as though it would suffocate him. “Mother hates me,” she said fervently, eyes falling shut. Delicate creases formed in the ridge between her brows. Azula would never cry, especially not in front of him, but still, there was a softness that rounded her shoulders, that brought the tilt of her lips down further into a grimace.

He was at a loss for words. “I—that’s not true.”

It was a lie. Zuko could only lie when it would not benefit him. “And how does that have anything to do with—with what happened?”

Azula sighed and some of her condescension seemed to return, albeit only slightly. “You’re such a fool, Zuzu,” she said quietly, without malice. There was a hint of envy in her voice that he did not understand.

“I’m not such a fool to believe our mother would do something like _that_.” Though even as he spoke, he felt as if the ground beneath him was turning in on itself. “You don’t even have any proof, do you?”

She did not reply. There was no sassy quip, no patronizing drawl, only silence. It was the closest thing Azula ever came to acceptance, to peace. At least, in the _before_.

..

Later, he learned that she had been right.

Later, he learned that the farmer who fell in love with the moon would have preferred it if he had never seen the moon at all.

Later, he learned that to be alive was some kind of fury.

..

Azula was crowned Fire Lord in 103 AG.

She was not the youngest Fire Lord in Fire Nation history, nor the most ambitious. She was however, the first to throw her older brother to the dungeons and banish her mother to the Earth Kingdom.

It happened in the night.

The sheets were torn off, and the next thing he knew he was being hauled out into the hall and down several flights of steps. Everywhere he turned, he was met with darkness and fear crawled its way up his throat until he was unsure of whether or not he was even breathing.

The guards were firm but not rough. They held him within their confines without abuse and they did not speak to him at all. If he was thirsty, they supplied him with water. If he whimpered, one would nudge his shoulder as if they were brothers.

Zuko did not know if this was a mercy on Azula’s part, or a machination of hers to terrify him further. He accepted it nonetheless, just as he accepted the steel bars around his square cell, the neat cot adjacent to the wall, the one window that let in light when the rain exhausted itself lulling him to sleep.

He accepted it because he believed he deserved it. Or rather, because Zuko had not yet learned what it meant to be angry. He had always felt fear, embraced it at times. But his fear had never given way to hatred, and so Azula ruled.

She kept him well-fed. There was no need for him to be well-dressed, but Azula sent him silks anyway. They collected dust in a pile perched on the sill.

Zuko slept. He dreamed.

..

To dream of destruction is prophetic in and of itself. That is what his uncle Iroh would have said to him.

If his mother had been beside him, she would have told him that not many firebenders had such a talent.

Zuko alone, washed the sweat from his damp hair and stared at the window. The sky seemed calm still.

..

News of Azula’s downfall reached him in whispers, and then in shouts. Much of it was indistinct, murky. Fragments of the Northern Water Tribe, of the Earth Kingdom, of the defiance of the Southern Water Tribe meant little to him. He had no recollection of such abstract oddities.

It was not until the guards began to speak with less discretion, when the colors of each kingdom became known to Zuko that the cluttered friction of his dreams laid bare what Azula had done.

The last guard looked solemn as he bid Zuko goodbye. “I’m sorry,” was all that he heard.

Zuko wondered if it would be princely to ask, “For what?”

..

They threw Azula in the same cell.

The man in green sneered at them as he secured the lock. “Are these truly the children of Ozai?” He taunted. “Such pathetic creatures.”

Azula did not flinch. Zuko had grown so numb he barely understood the words.

When the man was gone, and the new guards stepped a respectable distance away, he worked up the courage to acknowledge his younger sister. It always surprised him, how much younger she actually was.

“How?” _How did the most talented firebender in the last hundred years fall so low? How did someone like Azula find herself beside someone like him?_

Azula shrugged, unfazed at their reunion, at the man in green, at the innumerable enemies closing them in. “I thought I’d try being a fool,” she said. She turned to face him, awkwardly sitting with her hands frozen in ice behind her back. “Like you.”

“Why?”

She leaned against the iron bars and let her tangled hair stream to the unkempt, filthy ground on the right side of the barrier. “Life is so much simpler when you are a fool.”

He did not reply. Silence became them, and eventually Zuko succumbed to sleep.

When he awoke, there was an immediate rush of footsteps, harsh and clamoring in the distance. They filled his eardrums until dread was the only thing he could taste on his ashen tongue. He wondered if Azula could taste it too.

They were coming. This was the end. He was still afraid.

“How long?” he asked.

“A day, by my estimates.”

He nodded.

She studied him for some time, as if the opportunity had only now presented itself. As if before all this, he had never been worthy of her attention.

“You asked me all those years ago why I was so angry, _how_ I was so angry.” She looked away. “I was angry because I knew too much. I knew that no one understood me, that no one loved me, that father only wanted what he could take from me. I knew that at the end of it, where we are now, I would always be with someone who wished to rather have been alone.”

And in his next lives, however faintly, he would always remember her last words:

“Everyone loves a fool. That’s why mother loved you and not me. Why Uncle Iroh loved you and not me. Why the world loved you and not me.” She shook her head as if the past was an unpleasant insect on her shoulder. “If I had been a fool, would it have been at all different?”

She glanced back at him, but Zuko did not know how to answer.

Moments passed, until Azula finally nodded mutely, and he pretended not to notice when she turned her head to the side to hide any trace of emotion that had clung to her lashes while she spoke. Any remnant of a weakness she had never shared until then.

..

He did not mind the chill in the end. Perhaps it was because he died first.

Or perhaps, it was because in the final moments between a bloodbender and their prey, pain ceases to be anything but water.

..

Perhaps he should have loved her.

Would it have made a difference?

Zuko had never been taught the right way to love a tragedy.

**IV. Song**

His uncle remained beside him all through his next life.

He was not sure if Iroh too was living beyond the mortal restrictions, if he knew now that his nephew was in such a state of endless lessons to be learned. Or perhaps the idea of extended care was simply too fantastical for him to consider all on its own.

Either way, Ba Sing Se became his home the moment he stepped foot in it as a young teenager, shaking hand clasped in his uncle’s larger, more calloused one. The streets were tall and wide, and though the alleys were often littered with darkness and spite, he found them to be more welcoming than Caldera had ever been.

Here, the glare of his father’s gaze vanished into the stone walls. Instead of Azula’s high-pitched laughter, there was the quiet hum of laborers going about their day’s work, opening their shops and cleaning their stalls. His mother faded from his memory as he saw a world that lay outside the Fire Nation Palace, far far away from the faint warmth of her hand on his back.

When his uncle finally settled them in a small but peaceful house with light green shutters and bright yellow lamps, Zuko found himself saying thank you. He found himself lost in the daydream of hope.

..

As he grew up under the shadow of the continuing war however, the hope began to splinter. The spectacle of tranquility remained throughout Ba Sing Se, the spectacle he had unknowingly fallen in love with, but he knew more now. He could not deny the stories told of war crimes committed and atrocities that went unavenged.

Of the many customers of his uncle’s tea shop, those who talked in the most secretive of whispers were the ones he listened to most attentively. And on their lips was always the name _Ozai_.

..

He took to scouring rooftops at night to quiet the restlessness in his soul. The stars made him think of how much simpler life would be on the moon. How much of himself he would give up to become like the sun.

But most of all, they made him think of how little he felt like himself. How little he could ever gain in understanding himself when his father’s name haunted him no matter how far from the Fire Nation he fled.

..

The scar emblazoned across half his face became a liability sooner than later. During the nights, gangs and thugs would corner him for looking at them a certain way. They wanted to know how much fear he really deserved.

The first few times they won by attacking him off guard.

After that, he came prepared, donning a mask his uncle had brought with them from Caldera and the two swords he had trained with since he was a child. They fell to the ground in minutes, graceless and pitiful as the terror they once wielded died out.

The next time he found them inflicting pain on an innocent, the swords were flying in his hands without a second thought.

..

It was not until he turned fifteen that he met Song. The night had fallen sooner than he had anticipated the summer he found himself on the outskirts of the city. His opponent had dealt him a blow deeper than Zuko cared to admit that day, and he limped along the same path over and over with the reservoir of his hope in returning home early diminishing the darker the sky became.

At long last, he realized he was well and truly lost. He did not even remember how he had arrived in such a foreign place, only that he had been so intent on chasing his opponent away that he had not registered the amount of distance put between where he had started and where he was now.

He allowed himself to slump against an imposing tree that overlooked a dimly lit hospital building. For a moment, he wondered if they would treat his wound without asking about the scar or the time of day. He wondered if dying was even worth the risk of being found out. He wondered a lot of things as his eyes fell shut, and his thoughts merged with his dreams.

When he awoke, it was to the shine of an overhead light and a pulsing ache that beat against his side. A pale girl stood above him, her eyes infinitely kind. She held up his mask first, and then his swords, and said, “Are these yours?”

He nodded weakly.

Her eyes sparkled. “The Blue Spirit?” she asked excitedly.

Zuko’s voice culminated in only a low rasp. “Yes,” he said faintly. There was no point in denying it.

“I thought as much,” she said, nodding. A smile was curved delicately upon her lips. “We patched up the cut while you were asleep.” Her tone was almost apologetic. “We didn’t want to disturb you.”

“We?”

She turned her head to the side and he could hear footsteps echo across the room. “My mother and I,” she explained. An older, but just as kindly woman appeared beside Song.

He sat up slowly, wincing at the onslaught of pain that accompanied the movement. His first instinct was to flee, but a part of him shuddered at the thought.

It must have shown on his face because Song quickly said, “We won’t tell anyone, we promise.”

“I need to,” he stumbled, “get home.”

Concern etched itself into Song’s features. “I don’t think you should. The wound isn’t life-threatening, but it could open up again if you don’t get adequate rest.”

“I need to get home,” he insisted again. The thought of his uncle waiting worried in their lone tea shop triggered a more insufferable guilt than the pain at his side.

Her mother shook her head lightly. “You can stay with us child. Don’t push yourself too hard. It will require more time and healing in the end. Life is but a circle, everything will come back to you, good and bad.”

..

When he reunited with his uncle the next morning, he said nothing of where he had been or who he had met. He would have kept it a secret if they had not come into his uncle’s tea shop not long after, the vouchers he had left behind clasped in their hands.

..

“Are you happy, Zuko?” she asked one day. The dried jasmine leaves had sunk to the bottom of her cup, but the scent still permeated the air.

He flinched. “I don’t know.” He paused, staring down at his feet. “What does it mean to be happy? How do I know if I am or not? How do I learn?”

Song smiled and leaned across the round white table. “I can teach you.”

“To be happy?”

“Yes, Zuko. I can teach you how to be happy. You deserve peace, Zuko,” she said, raising her eyes to meet his. “Have you ever known it? Truly?”

His silence was answer enough. “Well, you deserve it,” Song rushed on, sincerity bleeding into every word. “You deserve peace. You deserve to grow old. You deserve to heal.”

“With you?”

A blush rose to her cheeks but she did not back down. “With anyone. With yourself, even.”

He nodded, mind absent. It sounded like a dream.

His second life thrummed against his ribs.

Zuko stood up. “Peace is nothing more than a lie.”

He was sorry for it when she pulled back as if stung, but not sorry enough. It was the truth.

..

When Iroh heard, he sat him down and gazed at him with sad eyes. “You will not even give it a try?” he asked, solemn. His weathered hand came to rest on Zuko’s shoulder. “You have not even begun to understand it.”

Zuko stared back, defeated. “How can I? I have been broken.”

His uncle began to weep. His uncle wept a lot, he learned. Oftentimes, it was because of him. Much sadness, he thought, could be traced back to something he did. How much sadness would erupt from what he would do in the future?

So he tried to stop his uncle from crying to the best of his abilities, and he went all the way back to Song’s small, bright house the next day and apologized.

She smiled as if the world had stopped and saved a seat all for her, sunlight shining down from above. Without thinking, he found himself smiling back.

They married two years later.

..

They had children and Zuko loved them with a muted ferocity.

The more he loved them, the more he did not understand how his father had not loved him. The more he held them in his arms, the more he did not understand how his mother had left him so suddenly. The more he watched them play, the more he did not understand how Azula had hated him so deeply.

The more his family grew, the more he lost sight of what he had lost.

This life was the happiest.

Then it too died.

..

He tilled the soil without the fire he once harbored deep within him. After years and years with Song, it had died out, flickered and then vanished in the night. He did not call it back; made no move to try and find a life for both it and the peacetime that surrounded him.

It was frightening to learn his existence was rather valueless outside the war. For all that his father had told him of his political incompetence and lack of talent, it seemed that that had been the only way fire could ever thrive alongside Zuko.

In fact, he still did not understand what fire even was.

It dashed in and out of his life at times. Often, he would have to light the fire for his children so they could warm themselves in the winter. In the summer, the fires Song used to cook kept their bellies well fed. The sun was fire always, but Zuko had become accustomed to a life where the familiar heat that tried to welcome him home only registered as a threat.

Fire was a threat, that he was sure of. It was a threat in his hands, and he wanted his hands clean. He swept the hair of his children away from their grinning faces with his hands, worked the fields to support their well-being with his hands, married Song with his hands and his head if not his heart.

His hands of all things would have to remain guiltless.

It was the only way to live.

..

Mutterings began. The Avatar had returned, was echoed between stalls. The Fire Nation would finally crumble, the Earth Kingdom would be set free. That was the intent, Zuko supposed. He did not allow himself time to even ponder such an event.

This was peace. A vague sort of emptiness. An absence of pain. The abandonment of thought.

..

The Avatar had failed was what he heard. The tiny bald child with the large blue arrow and permanent smile on his face had failed. It did not reach him until years later, when the Avatar’s gang had scattered, and the Fire Nation still ruled the world.

He had not been able to master all four elements, the townspeople muttered. How can one fight fire without fire? they scorned. Zuko understood them, understood that they were only angry for the faith that had been lost. They had hoped against belief that the child would succeed, and he had not not.

But no difference. His life went on. He raised the children, and told them stories. He told them stories of lands that did not exist in their universe, lands that were not marred by war. He tried to take them to places where they were happy forever, and not just in seconds of moments. He imagined them a world without fire.

Surely, that was enough?

..

He always watched the sunset alone.

He gave up the Blue Spirit after his children had been born at Song’s request, but there always existed within him a solitude that could not be stamped out.

It was his debt to Song in truth. He traded his swords for his hands, and his anger for sadness. He grew into it, grew into a life he could barely call his. It felt right to change.

..

“Zuko?”

He glanced up from the book he was reading, gold eyes jumping to the figure that lay beneath the white, pale and drained. The poison had been accidental, but the effects were not.

Song was dying. The fumes from the recently built Fire Nation factory had already taken half her heart. “Hmm?”

“We led a good life, right?”

He did not hide his surprise. “Of course.” And in his mind, it registered as nothing but the truth.

She forced a smile, unnatural and too wide. Her eyes did not crinkle into crescents like they usually did. Her wrists were thinner than he remembered. He wanted to rewind time. “You don’t regret it?”

“Regret what?” he asked, baffled.

“Choosing to spend it with me.”

“No,” he said firmly. “Not at all.”

She let out a deep breath. It trembled in the distance between them. This time, the smile softened into something more genuine, a smile he had come to know with aching intimacy. “I’m glad,” she said quietly. “When they told me I was going to die, I wasn’t afraid. Not of death, anyway.” She stared into the distance, eyes glassy. Slowly, Zuko heard her labored breathing still. “One day,” she began with effort, “I hope you find your way home. No matter the distance.”

Her hand went limp against his. The light in her eyes died out.

Zuko wept.

..

He outlived his children by some years, acquiring an age beyond his imagination. When his bones became too brittle, and his spine started to hunch, the fire began.

A spirit had visited, painted in red and dressed in white. She had asked the villagers to fight with her, to stand tall against the Fire Nation noose tied around their neck. A revolution, they called it. A rebellion, in truth. A rebellion must succeed to become something larger than itself.

It did in some sense. And Zuko lived to see others do what he had never done. The factories were set alight, silver glinted in the sunlight as swords pierced blood. Water enveloped the innocent and drowned the rest.

The fire swept through his town, and when the first flames began to lick at the windows and bedroom walls, Zuko stared with his eyes wide open.

He stared his shame in the face, and died.

..

Perhaps he should have loved her.

Would it have made a difference?

Zuko had never been taught the right way to love someone who loved too much.

**V. Mai**

He listened. This time, he made sure to listen.

..

His father noticed, even Azula did. When his mother left without a trace as she had before, they offered him a chance. He took it. He cut himself out of who he was and made himself better. This time, he made it count.

How else was he to end this unending spiral of misery?

..

He was betrothed to Mai before he reached the age of sixteen. She was a rich man’s daughter, first and foremost. A rich man’s daughter could pay her way into a bloodline. A rich man’s daughter could understand Azula. A rich man’s daughter could make a rich man’s wife.

Zuko accepted it. He had learned, and he knew how to show it. He thanked his father for such an opportunity, thanked Azula for her choice in friends, and thanked Mai for the fact that she was so willing.

They both knew that was a lie.

..

They evolved into actors, with a script perpetually in hand. It was not by nature that it occurred, but by a formed habit, a habit Mai had developed since she was a child.

In fact, Zuko could ascertain the exact moment when it all changed, when Mai got through to him and taught him how to hide what he felt. She improved him in his father’s eyes. She mellowed him until he was always at the point just below simmering.

When they were together, the curtain fell away and Zuko knew to move with the tide instead of against it. They bathed in approval. They bathed in gold.

..

Zuko no longer saw his uncle. He refused him at every turn.

..

Azula did not like him better. She respected him more, perhaps, but she became far more competitive as he grew in his father’s esteem. In hindsight, he should have laughed at the pathetic way in which they fought over any measly scrap of praise or acceptance as if animals. Their nation boasted of superior capabilities, of greater power, but Zuko wondered how true that was when he and Azula were both guided by baser desires; nothing more than fear and hate.

Sometimes, and he would never tell this to anyone, he even entertained the thought that she feared him. Not for who he was, but for what he might become.

..

She was right to. In fact, she must have feared him more than he could have ever anticipated because he bested her in combat a year later. He pretended not to see the jagged cut of her bangs, or the frenzied look in the terrifyingly familiar gold eyes. His ignorant facade continued even when she began to chant their mother’s name as if it were a prayer or a curse, or both. She screamed at their father, asking why he had abandoned her as their mother had when all she had done had been through his guidance.

Ozai did not flinch. He only turned to Zuko with an air of forced propriety and gave his final nod of approval. It was all that mattered. The throne was his for taking.

The only option left was to take it.

If he had been more poorly taught, he might have shuddered at the thought of stepping over the ruins of Azula’s brilliance to accomplish such a task.

He still did, though he never told it to anyone.

..

The day he married was the last day he ever saw Azula. It was also the hottest day in Fire Nation history, so much so that a great number of his wedding guests collapsed from the heat and dehydration. Despite the caravan of water that continued to be hailed at every turn, when it came down to it, he promised his life to Mai in front of barely twenty people. Their faces barely registered to him, white blank canvases wiped clean of any expression besides approval. It haunted him then, that his was the same.

He did not love Mai, or at least he did not think he did. He did not understand what love was to begin with, if somewhere between their crafted facades some kind of understanding could arise. For all the time that they spent together, he did not know her at all.

He knew what kind of delicacies she liked, how much she loathed her father, the way in which she never used the same word twice in a sentence. But beyond that, it was impossible to discover more of her, to find and match together the pieces of her that she scattered in her wake.

He thought she knew him rather well, in contrast. She had hid for so long, yet she knew what she was underneath. He had hid for some length of his childhood, and knew only to watch as his own self fell away into the abyss, disappearing the farther it dropped.

He said the words anyway, as he had memorized them years before, watching himself from inside his mind, trying his best to understand if one could go mad when everything else was going right. If the only way to ever go mad was always right before a fall. The rest of him had already.

He wondered what kind of insurrection all those lost and tired things would make when he had stretched himself too far, when he had let his head oppress too much of his heart.

From the corner of his eye, he recognized her in the distance, perched upon the roof of the palace. Her dark hair was slashed and matted with sweat as if before arriving she had run very quickly from something or someone. Yet she looked eerily calm. Her gaze did not waver from his for a moment, gold burning into gold, her pain molding into his. In that moment, he knew it was a goodbye. It was a promise too.

He and Azula were more alike than his father gave them credit for.

..

The night before his coronation found him beside the turtle ducks. He had not been since he was a child, but perhaps the final absence of his father had granted him just this little bit of freedom. He would be in charge of the Fire Nation now, as Ozai toured the lands he had conquered, going by the name of the Phoenix King with a carefully cut crown to match, crying of the rebirth of the world under the reign of their empire.

Zuko’s elevation to Fire Lord was more a spectacle than anything else. Ozai cared more for celebrating the final fall of the Southern Water Tribe than his son’s ability to rule. So much of their victory was clouded in the talent of their performers.

He had thought by this time, he too would have become some integral part of it. Instead, it was always as if he felt a spotlight above him that singled him out from the rest. A con, a fraud.

The pressure did not go away. The heavy weight that he now felt tower precariously on his shoulders did not lighten. He did not have to spend hours poring over books to know how quickly empires crumbled.

Perhaps, he was rather an empire himself.

“Do you think I’ve corrupted myself?” he asked as Mai sat down. Her knees brushed his.

Her voice was flat. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think a good Fire Lord can be corrupt.”

“Your father was,” she replied, blunt. “He still is,” she added.

He shrugged. “I am not my father.” It hurt to say it aloud. It hurt to say the opposite too sometimes.

“No,” Mai agreed. “You’re worse.”

Zuko let out a bitter laugh. “How so?”

She shifted herself away from the moon to stare at him, half her features drowned in shadow. “Because you still know shame.”

“And you?” He tilted his head as he studied her back.

“Corruption is only real for those who believe it exists,” she said factually. “If you don’t believe in such a thing, you cannot embody it. You still believe, Zuko. After all these years, you still believe in it; in good and bad.”

He lost his temper. “And what was I supposed to do then?” He threw his hands up in despair and stood up. “I have acted until I was sure I had lost myself in who I wanted to be. Now you tell me I’m wrong.”

Mai flicked a spare strand of hair away from her face with a delicate finger. “You’ll always be wrong Zuko, as long as you believe _they_ were right.”

..

The moment the crown settled into his knot of hair, Zuko felt his heart stutter. He almost lost his nerve, sweat pooling at his temples. His hands trembled, and as he stood up a dizziness suddenly overtook him.

The circus had begun.

The world spun.

..

There was a memory he thought of often. He could even bring most of its characteristics to life in his head; the color of Mai’s dress, the tea he had drunk earlier that day, the sun as it swallowed up the clouds around it.

“Your father does not like me,” he had observed casually. His fingers continued to drum on the desk beside him as he leaned against it. He had called her into his chamber for no other reason. The acute discomfort he had felt the previous day when meeting Mai’s parents had not abided even in his sleep.

Mai narrowed her eyes, and the tightly settled line of her mouth grew thinner. She did not step away from the closed door behind her nor did she bother to deny the accusation. “My father does not like anyone.”

Zuko shrugged. “Perhaps,” he relented, “but he does not approve of me in particular.”

His betrothed scoffed. “He’s making me marry you,” she said pointedly. “Why cart off his daughter to marry someone he does not approve of?”

“Power,” Zuko said firmly. “Power is all there is.”

A ghost of a smile crossed her stern features. She was unbearably pretty when she smiled. “Did Azula teach you that?”

He did not flinch at the evocation of his sister’s name, though the memory of her madness was too clear, too sharp to be forgotten. “No. I taught myself that.”

Mai raised an eyebrow. “A self-taught Fire Lord,” she murmured. “I am not sure the world is ready yet for such a person.”

He stepped forward. “Is your father?”

She did not answer. Instead, she looked away and said, “He sees too much of you. He sees too much of how fragile your place beneath Ozai is.” She turned back. “I thought I taught you well,” she said, regret coloring her words bitter. “I guess I was wrong.”

..

His dreams were not fond of Mai’s father though. His aged face flickered sometimes, eyes boring into Zuko’s like they would break him apart, like the weakness that had overtaken him in his third life would be all that was left. But eventually it too faded.

After that, they only favored the fantastical. Strokes of brown and grey and blue dominated the world beneath his eyelids. He wondered if they were from a different time. He wondered if that meant there more chances to be had, more lives beyond this one.

He wondered, even as the edges of his dreams began to be accompanied by pain, if that meant he had failed again. If this life too, had been no different from the ones that had come before. Was he about to die? Had he done so already?

And most importantly, had he well and truly learned? The girl blurred by the shadows of his mind seemed to tell him he had.

He did not want to make her a liar.

..

He chased the echoes of her laughter into the deep dark depths of the sea, into the scorching fires of his childhood, and yet her face never came into view. It was always the same glitter of the stars in her hair, the same foreboding that it would all end too soon. The same loss of warmth when she disappeared too suddenly into thin air.

He lived in those dreams over and over again. He lived in those dreams, latched onto them as tightly as he had held onto anything, until she turned her head.

Blue eyes. Piercing recognition that bled.

..

He woke up to an empty room.

There were no servants, no Ozai, no Mai. Even the sun had fled, and the moon was bright and glowing in the darkened sky. Some part of him wanted desperately to hold it in his hands, look into it and parcel out his future. Perhaps there was hope there. Perhaps, peace.

He felt weak, weaker than he had when he had just been born. His limbs were slow to react, and his throat was thick and heavy, draped in some substance that reminded him of honey. Tea sat steaming on the table beside him, though he did not recognize the scent. It was almost as if it had no scent at all.

He drank it anyway, and exhaled in relief when his throat cleared up. The sweetness of the tea was strange, though. If it had been stronger, he would not have been able to taste the lingering sharpness. He thought of Iroh then, of where his uncle was now, if he still made tea the way the Fire Nation had unmade him.

A sudden stab of pain made him pause. Someone was at the door.

Mai appeared a moment later, her hair uncharacteristically loose around her shoulders. She looked sad, the light in her eyes dimming as she appraised him. “It’s been two months,” she said before he could try and speak. She crossed her legs as she sat down. He noticed her dress was black, as if she was in mourning.

“Your father is furious. My father is even worse. I suppose it’s only natural,” she said ruefully. “I think even from the beginning, I knew you would struggle. You’re not like me Zuko. I don’t know why I thought you were. You’re not like anyone here. That’s why you’ve ended up like this.”

“Like what?” His voice was scratchy from disuse. It hurt to breathe.

“On your deathbed,” she said plainly. “I almost wrote to tell you,” she added. “And then I thought about it. And I realized, what would be the point? My father was going to try and kill you anyway, through whatever means possible whether it be poison or not. If you did not die today, you would die tomorrow. You are already dying, Zuko. You have been since we met.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “You see, Zuko, power may be all there is, but love is what sustains it, and I don’t love you.”

Abruptly, she rose from her seat and looked down at him one last time. Her skin seemed even paler than usual. “I’m sorry,” she said. The sincerity of her words stung.

He wished he would never see her again. He wished he might not miss her as much. He wished he had been stronger, if not for her, than what they might have been.

Zuko summoned all his strength to utter a reply. He was going to die. More pain did not matter. “For what?”

She smiled wryly. “For not being able to love you.”

He croaked a laugh as the hollows of his ribs threatened to shudder from within. “You fool,” he whispered. “It was I who did not love you. The fault is mine.”

“And if you had?” Mai asked. She did not wait for an answer. Sometimes he could detect all the ways in which she reminded him of Azula. “It would not have made a difference,” she finished. “Not at all. We are not people who can save each other. You were right,” she admitted. “I was a fool. But so were you.”

She turned away, and Zuko finally let his eyes shut to the outline of her silhouette as it faded from view.

..

Perhaps he should have loved her.

Would it have made a difference?

Zuko had never been taught the right way to love someone who did not want to be loved.


	2. and all through time

**I. Land / First Meeting**

When he woke up, there was little to be remembered. It was as if he had not died at all. Crystals lay overhead, glowing with the utmost intensity, as if they were willing him to rise, dust himself off, and begin again. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to yet. He wasn’t sure if he was even alive.

If to be alive was to shake off death again and again until he grew so sick of it that he let himself go.

There was a girl kneeling before him, a heavy mass of dark hair covering her bent face. He thought he knew her in a vague and curious way, though the moment her head lifted he only recognized a stranger.

“Zuko?”

He nodded faintly. That was his name. Zuko. _Failure_. _Loved one_. He was certainly one of those things, but he did not know if he was the other.

A look of relief crossed her face, and she smiled. “I’m glad you’re awake. I thought I had lost you there.”

The confusion must have been apparent in his features because she quickly elaborated, “You collapsed.” She stopped. “I don’t know how or why, you just did. It was like something had suddenly occurred inside you, and I guess your body didn’t know how else to take it.”

He pulled himself up, conscious of how close she moved beside him. “What’s your name?” he asked. His voice sounded awful even to his own ears, rough and brittle.

Her eyes widened. “You don’t know who I am?”

“Should I?” Zuko stared at her, sweeping his gaze from the delicate bow of her upper lip to the bridge of her nose and the dark eyelashes that feathered along the edge of bright blue. The blue made him pause. The color seemed so familiar to him, and yet it tasted like downfall on the tip of his tongue.

She swallowed. “I’m Katara,” she said. Her eyes filled with tears, but she rubbed them away furiously, as though she did not know why she was crying in the first place. “You really don’t know me?”

Zuko shrugged, feeling immediately sorry for the sadness that the girl now embodied. “I suppose not.” He hoped she did not become like him. Sadness was too heavy a weight for someone else to bear.

She looked down. “Oh.”

A long stretch of silence followed as they sat beside each other on the green-lit ground. It almost felt like peace. There was no one else beside this girl he felt he knew, nothing but the tranquility of a cave in which he could try and forget his pain. He wanted to forget everything. He wanted to be someone else.

“What if we stayed down here forever?” she spoke suddenly. “If no one came to get us?”

He laughed faintly. “I don’t think anyone will come and get me,” he said.

She studied him, confusion crossing her face. “You don’t have anyone?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Do you?”

“Yes,” Katara said, leaning back against the wall. She seemed conflicted, her hesitation making the silence return. “How come you don’t have anyone who cares for you?” she asked at last.

Zuko shrugged, staring at the ground. “I don’t think I’ve lived long enough to keep someone around.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, standing up. “How long do you possibly have to live for that to happen?”

He raised his eyes to meet hers. “Centuries,” he said. “Why else do you think I’ve given up waiting?”

..

“I have a sister,” he said after a while. It felt wrong to say nothing.

Katara gave out a wry smile. “I know,” she replied.

He turned to face her in shock. “How?”

She studied him for a long moment, and then crawled closer. She seemed to deliberate heavily on something before she said, “You really don’t remember anything?”

“Remember what?” he asked, confused. In truth, he remembered many things, but he did not want to tell her that he did not remember her.

She shrugged, but the serious way in which she continued to stare at him convinced him that she knew far more than she was letting on. “You’ve lived quite a sordid life from what I’ve heard,” she said, averting her gaze. “And seen,” she tacked on.

He almost felt like laughing. What other life was this? What other sin had he committed? “What did I do?”

She sighed, fiddling with a loose stone that was embedded beneath her palms. “Have you ever heard of the Avatar?”

And the memories came flashing back.

..

Was it destiny? Did such a thing even exist?

..

The Avatar crashed through the walls with Zuko’s uncle by his side. When he first laid his eyes on Iroh, the wave of guilt that he had suppressed for so long broke free, and he cowed away from his uncle’s embrace. He did not look at his uncle at all. He did not look at anyone or anything, including the girl called Katara, the girl who had defeated him all the way back in the Northern Water Tribe, who had touched his scar and hauled him out of all the lives in which he could not die.

Instead, he listened to Azula wax poetic about his dreams, about how proud their father would be when he heard that it was _Zuko_ who had found the Avatar at last, who had brought an end to any hope he may have offered the world. He listened, and wondered what the point would be. He could fight with Azula and win, he could follow his uncle’s advice and lose. He could do neither and that would be something in and of itself too.

He _could_ do a lot of things, but what he _wanted_ to do seemed as far away as his mother. As far away as that second life he had led, when he learned that most things people told him were lies, that what he told himself too were often lies as well.

The girl hadn’t lied to him, the girl named Katara who dressed in blue but was now drenched in green light. She had told him the truth, and that was what occupied his mind as he followed Azula out into that darkened abyss.

Of all the people in the world, he had found her again. She was the healer who knew the shape of his scars, the passenger on the ship who had laughed when he had told her he was a prince, the bloodbender who brought his end to a close before his sister ever could, the spirit who cried justice as his years limped away and hopelessness overtook him, the girl who had run all the way into his dreams.

She was so many people he knew, and yet he did not know her at all.

..

He fought the Avatar because it felt good to fight. It felt like his own kind of vindication, that at last, _at last_ , he could hold his own against that tiny bald child with the blue arrow stamped across his head, some version of the scar that Zuko could not let go. They were both promises, both symbols of doom.

He fought Katara too, dodging her water and her ice, wondering how much of herself was in the way she moved, in the way she thrust her all at those she registered as a threat, those who would take away all that she held dear. Some part of him hated her too, hated that she knew so clearly what she was.

He fought Ozai last. In his mind, his father was there with him, in front of him, behind him, beside him. He was in the missteps that Zuko felt sting, in the shame that roared in his throat when Katara got the best of him and water slipped under his feet. He fought his father with the knowledge that this would be their final battle, their final confrontation.

He fought with all the anger that had resided inside him, that had flourished now that he knew there was no happy ending, no reunion or restoration of his honor. There was nothing at all that was waiting for him. Azula hadn’t lied, not like his mother had, but she hadn’t told the whole truth. He recognized that now, and he hoped that it counted as progress.

He felt the burns from his first life take flight. He lost what had tethered him to the ground in which he had made his grave.

And then.

Azula aimed at Aang, and then at Katara who had jumped in front of him. The harsh beating of Zuko’s heart retracted into a low hum, and he was suddenly conscious of all that was unfolding before him, sensitive to the energy that sparked and splintered at Azula’s fingertips, to the wave of bright blue water that was gearing itself in his direction, to the fundamental knowledge that though he might not be willing to die for the Avatar, he was willing enough to die for a girl who had tried to know him. Who had listened. Who was not his father.

He turned, and the world spun in slow motion. He felt the fire bloom from his hands, remembered the last etch of glee on his younger sister’s face before everything was enveloped in flames.

For once, the element he had never been able to master clung to him as though he were a lost child. It clung to him as though it were the mother he had once had, long long ago.

..

And he woke again.

**II. Sea / The Conception of a Relationship**

Katara stood above him, her face crowding into his vision. “You’re awake,” she said in relief. “I almost thought you had died.” She paused. “Like in the cave.”

He flexed his fingers, craned his neck up to glance at the sky, and at the sea that surrounded him in a glimmer of blue. “I’m not dead?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said happily. “You’re not.”

“But I should be.”

“Why would you say that?” she asked, her smile fading.

“That’s how it has always worked. I have always died.”

Her eyebrows scrunched together in concern. “Are you alright Zuko? Somehow, I think you’re still dreaming.”

He gazed out into the distance. If only. “My uncle?”

Her shoulders slumped. “We don’t know,” she said quietly. “It all happened so fast, you were fighting with your sister, and then suddenly you weren’t, and then you were falling, and then it was your uncle telling us to run. So we did.”

His voice sounded strange when he next spoke. “I owe him too much already. And now I owe him more.”

There was silence. He knew she would not understand, but he had said it anyway. He wanted to. Finally, she said without meeting his eyes, “Why did you do it?”

He continued to stare into the depths of the sea, pondering that question himself. He was glad she had asked it, because if she had not, he did not think he would ever have the nerve to admit it. “I did it for myself,” he said. It was the truth.

..

Her brother did not like him. Neither did the Avatar for that matter. They both viewed him through suspicious eyes, as if they were waiting for the moment when he would betray them, when the mask would be torn off and they would be vindicated. The blind girl from the Earth Kingdom did not seem to care about him at all, though she was the kindest after Katara.

She had stared at him with her milky white eyes, and said, “If Iroh likes you, then I don’t have a problem either. Unlike these two knuckleheads, I like to think I’m a good judge of character.”

He had said nothing in response, so she had merely shrugged. “You remind me of her,” she continued, “of Katara. You’re both too ingrained in your sadness.”

“What sadness?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s so obvious I’m tired of feeling it everywhere you go. Wherever she goes too.” She stood a moment longer. “You should listen to your uncle,” she said finally.

“You’re twelve,” he said, astonished.

“So?”

“You’re a lot smarter than I was at twelve.”

The girl snorted. “I don’t think that’s an achievement.”

“No,” he nodded. “Probably not.”

..

The tension broke when they finally arrived on the shore of a distant Fire Nation island. Katara’s brother had eyed him with obvious distrust when he attempted to disembark from the ship, holding his boomerang out as a threat.

“How do we know you’re not going to slink off into a village and notify the Fire Lord or your sister that we’re here? How do we know you’re not going to tell the entire village who we are?”

“I won’t,” Zuko said stubbornly. “I wouldn’t be here at all if I was planning to do that. Wouldn’t it have been easier for me to simply have fought with Azula against you guys back in Ba Sing Se instead of following you all the way here?”

“You _did_ fight with Azula.” Sokka pointed out sharply.

“And then I changed my mind,” Zuko said. The expression on the other boy’s face did not change. He and the Avatar still looked unconvinced, while Toph’s mouth had settled into an amused line. Katara only stood beside them, her lips twisted into a frown.

Alright,” he conceded. “How do I get you guys to trust me?”

Sokka openly stared at him in response, blue boring into gold. His eyes were so similar to Katara’s, yet the light in them was so different. They were calm, steady. They analyzed him as if he were a problem to be solved. Finally, he said, “Why did you do it?”

It was the same question Katara had asked him. The same answer rose in his throat, but he could not say it. He did not think they would understand. Instead, he stared back. “Why do _you_ think I did it?” He turned to the Avatar. “And you, what do you suppose my reasoning was?”

Sokka was silent for a moment, his hand coming to rest under his chin. Zuko wondered how long the question had been simmering in the back of his mind. It was obvious that they all wanted to know, and that whatever conclusion they came toward would impact whether or not he would be able to stay.

Did he even want to stay?

He did not have anywhere else to go.

“Guilt,” Sokka said at last. “I think you did it because you felt guilty. For what, I don’t know.” He glanced at Aang.

“I think it’s because there’s some part of you that’s a good person.” Aang said promptly. His cheerfulness had not abated. “I think there’s a good person in everyone even if they may not know it.”

Zuko laughed, bitterness coloring his words, “You haven’t met my father,” he said.

The child sobered, and his grey eyes shot to the ground. “I will one day.” His voice was low, afraid. “I have to.”

Zuko thought back to the flash of light, to his first death. “You will have to win.”

Aang raised his head. He almost seemed his age for once, a hundred years of solitude weighing his small shoulders down. “Win what?” he said.

“The world,” Zuko replied. “Peace.”

The Avatar’s face crumpled in confusion. “Peace cannot be won.” he said with effort. “Neither can the world. It has to be given freely.”

Zuko sighed. “What _has_ to be done, and what _is_ done are rarely ever the same thing.”

_My father should have loved me, but he did not_ , he did not say. _My mother should have stayed, but she did not. I should have died by now, but here I am._

..

He began to teach the Avatar, arguing to the team that it would be more advantageous to them if they ever decided to fight him. And how else would the Avatar be able to defeat his father?

It was difficult at first. He still struggled with controlling his own anger, with calming the tide and making sure it would not rise up again.

And the child, Aang — that was his name — was too impatient. He reminded Zuko of his younger self, always so eager, so desperate to have something the moment the desire came into being. But fire had a mind of its own, and it did not mold itself to the expectations of humans. To control fire, one had to move with it, to _become_ it. This is what he tried to teach Aang.

“Like water?” he said curiously.

Zuko cocked his head. “What makes you say that?” he asked.

Aang shrugged, his bald head shining in the sunlight. “I don’t know. It sounds like what Katara tried to teach me when we were learning waterbending. About letting go.”

Zuko felt himself nod. “That sounds about right. The more you try and control fire, the less willing it will be. You have to trust it instead of forcing it. If you force it too much because you want it so badly, you will hurt it, and it will hurt you.”

“Huh.” Aang looked thoughtful. “When did you get so wise?”

He smiled sadly. “I made a lot of mistakes. I make them still.”

**..**

“Toph is scamming people so we can buy food,” Katara said as she sat down on the large grey slab of rock resting on the edge of the river. “Now she’s angry that I mother her too much. That I’m no fun.”

Zuko wanted to laugh. “Not everyone can be fun,” he said.

She sighed. “I guess.” She dipped her hands under the water and added, “I can’t help the mothering. It just — it just comes out. And who else is going to be there for Aang and Toph? Even Sokka. They’re all just children.”

This time, he did laugh, a strange feeling coming over him. “You are too.”

She stared at him blankly for a moment, and then burst into laughter herself. “Yeah,” she said, “I guess I am. I keep forgetting.”

He shrugged. “I forget too. I think we’ve all had to grow up too fast. Toph’s only angry that you mother her too much because she doesn’t think she needs parents anymore. She thinks she’s got it all figured out and that you’re trying to change her like her parents did once.”

Katara nodded. “That makes sense,” she said. For a moment there was only silence, but he could tell she had more to say. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders in a way he had never noticed before. He tried not to stare.

“Toph says I’m too sad,” she said at last, playing with the water again. “And too angry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

She tilted her head. “Why are you sad?”

“I’m stuck,” he said, the last remnant of the confession gathering in the air. It was freeing. “I can’t get out of it, out of dying.”

She stared down at her hands, bringing them out of the stream and twisting them together. Her expression was impassive, almost too carefully so. “How many times have you died?” she asked, looking up. She seemed to understand what he was saying this time. He did not know how or why.

“Five,” he said. “I suppose this will be my sixth.”

“What will you do when you wake up again?”

He shrugged, though he felt his lips tighten. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “What _can_ I do?”

“You can live,” she said. “Have you done that yet?”

He barked a laugh. “Yes,” he said roughly, “many times.”

“Well it hasn’t worked, has it?” She tilted her head in question. “You’re still dying.”

“Perhaps, I will always die.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Perhaps, that is all I will ever be.”

She frowned. “Don’t be silly, Zuko,” she said. “You are so much more than that.”

“If I was,” he said slowly, enough to make sure she understood him, “don’t you think I would be dead by now? Well and truly dead? I’m living because I failed.”

“No,” Katara shook her head, a fierce light coming into her eyes, “You’re living because you’ve still got more life to live. You’re living because you haven’t used up all your chances yet. You’re living,” she pressed her hand against his chest, warmth emanating from every part of her, “because you haven’t met the right people yet. Until now.”

He stood and stepped back, fear making him weak. “You can’t save me, Katara.”

She chased after him. It was strange how so much of her was living heat when her element was all water, all ice. “No,” she said. “Only you can save yourself. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try.”

The question that had been on the tip of his tongue since he met her finally gave way, died and then was reborn in that moment. “Why?”

“Because you’re worth it,” she said, a tower of her own creation; no wreckage, no ruin.

..

When she saved them all, making blood dance and sing to her own desperation spread thin over music, he did not know what else to do but hold her. He held her and held her, and felt her return. Little by little, piece by piece. First the light in her eyes, then the energy flowing through her limbs. And her soul, bright and brilliant as the moon under which she had made herself.

He held her until the sun bloomed above the trees and wondered what he could do now that he was forever in her debt. Save the world if need be. Save it and make it better. For her. For all of them.

Yes, destiny was a thing of truth; of wonders.

..

The tiled floors were sleek and glossy beneath his feet. He tried not to look at his reflection. Katara and the others would be making their way inland by now. He had come early, Aang, Toph, and Sokka searching the other parts of the bunker. He did not know whether it was a blessing or a curse that he knew instinctively where his father would be.

“Father.”

Ozai did not seem fazed by his son returning. “He returns,” he said softly. “I was beginning to think he never would.”

“Did that excite you?” Zuko asked, remarkably calm for the first time in his life. “After all, you sent me searching for someone you thought did not exist for years on end.”

“No,” his father said. He scanned his son from head to toe. “I rather thought it fitting.”

Zuko paused. “Why did you name me Zuko?” he asked. It had been weighing on his mind since he had been reborn in that cave of crystals, that bridge between what he had been and who he was now.

“Failure, loved one. I wonder why I couldn’t have been both. I wonder why I only got to be one. Why did you choose that for me? I was just a child.”

“A child with enough disrespect to dishonor his father,” Ozai said. “You chose that for yourself, Zuko. Just as Azula chose _not_ to be what you are, _not_ to go down that road you paved with your own disgrace.”

“I will save her,” he said, summoning all his bravery. It was no use to argue with him anymore. All he had now was hope. “As someone once saved me.”

Ozai let out a harsh laugh. “Save her?” he asked, a mocking smile curled upon his lips. “She does not need to be saved, not the least by someone like you.”

Zuko paused, shocked that his father’s cruelty still managed to surprise him. “Of course,” he said, coming to terms with it all over again. “Of course you would think that. Of course you would believe such a lie. After all, you are the one who ruined her. Who ruined me.”

His father leaned forward, locking his hands together as his eyes glinted in the light. “How exactly did I commit such an act of atrocity?” he asked, amused. “And what made it my sin instead of yours? Did you not listen to a word I said? Choices, Zuko. That is all we are.”

He did not flinch, and for that he was proud. “You made me feel wrong for doing what was right. That was your _choice_. You punished me, emblazoned this scar _on your own son_ , for caring. All my life, this has followed me. It will until death, I cannot change it. But you’re right, I can choose. I _have_ chosen. I can change who I am, I can change from the boy who did not trust himself. I can do what I know is right, what I _feel_ is right, because I am not afraid of you anymore. You no longer matter to me.”

The expression on Ozai’s face grew darker. “And your sister?”

“I believe I can save her. I believe it because I don’t believe in you.”

He turned, shuddering, and took the first step the way he had come. Home, he thought. This had never been his home, but the way back to the friends he now had was. Home was never meant to be a lonely place.

“You ignorant fool. You absolute child.” The pain the words might once have triggered had dulled. “You will never win that way.”

He stopped and looked back, studied his father, his mannerisms, the dark hall in which so many nightmares had been reenacted and re-lived. He almost smiled. “Don’t you see?” he said. “It’s not about winning. None of this has _ever_ been about winning. It is you who does not understand. You, who is the child and the fool.”

Ozai raised his hand as if to bend, but Zuko knew the eclipse had not ended yet. “We still have time,” he said.

His father curled his lip. “ _We?_ ”

“You found him.” Sokka’s voice interrupted them, bouncing off one wall to the next as it echoed loudly. It made the Avatar beside him tremble.

He turned to them. “Yes, I suppose I did.”

Toph nudged Aang with her shoulder. “Well? Now’s your time Twinkletoes. Before it’s too late.”

Ozai laughed. He did not seem afraid at all. “This is the Avatar?” He stared at Aang with pity in his eyes. “He will not be able to do it. He will not be able to kill me. You children really are fools. I told my son so,” he bent his head in Zuko’s direction, “but he did not listen. He insisted _I_ was the fool. Well, proceed.” He leaned back in his throne. “Bring an end to my reign of tyranny.”

Aang closed his eyes, but they failed to take on the glow that Zuko remembered from Ba Sing Se. Time passed in increments with no light appearing. Soon, his father would be able to regain his fire.

“Aang?” Sokka stared at the Avatar, concern etched into his face. “You have to do it now.”

The child tensed and then stilled. He opened his eyes, defeat settling in their depths. “I can’t,” he said, lips twisting. “It’s wrong. He’s defenseless.”

Toph stamped her foot on the ground. “Oh _fine_ , I’ll do it.”

She could not even raise her arms, the lightning came so suddenly, without warning. The eclipse had ended.

Zuko caught it, drove it back in a wave of fire.

They fled.

..

He met Iroh in the darkness. And suddenly he no longer needed the light to know which way to turn. It was inside him.

He searched for Azula, tried to find her in that same darkness. He wanted to show her that she could be more than a tragedy, more than someone afraid to be anything but perfect. But Iroh stopped him, resting a hand on his shoulder, kind eyes dimming.

“You want to save her.”

He nodded.

“Zuko,” his uncle began quietly, “She will have to save herself.”

Fear crawled its way up his throat. “And if she doesn’t?”

“Then that is her choice. That is her life. You cannot save everyone, and not everyone wants to be saved.”

“I will come back for her one day,” he said, gripping onto the last vestige of anything he could call family. “I can’t give up.”

“Perhaps, by then, things will be different,” his uncle said optimistically. “But first, you must save yourself.”

“I have,” Zuko said.

“I know.” Iroh smiled, so very different from the father he had left behind. “It fits you.” Something caught his eye in the distance, though what it was Zuko did not know. His uncle stopped. “And here, I say goodbye.”

His pulse quickened. “Goodbye?”

Iroh smiled again, though this time it was tinged with melancholy. “There is still much to do. All is not lost.”

He tried not to panic. “Where will you go?”

His uncle looked back at the far away object in the sky. “Somewhere,” he said, “where I will be of more use. Worry not, my dear nephew.” He turned back. “We will see each other again.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I have seen it. It is something that one simply knows. But Zuko,” the melancholy faded, “I am proud of you. Very, very proud of the person you have become.”

..

They found refuge in the Western Air Temple shortly after. When Azula next found them, dark hair flying in the wind and the glint in her eyes no less ambitious, he wanted to beg her to listen. He wanted to tell her that their father was a bad man, that their mother was gone, vanished as if she had never existed to begin with, but that they would be able to have each other. That there were other ways to fall that hurt less, that made someone less into a fool.

But as he faced her, he felt the words die on his tongue. He could not make her see it. He would never be able to make her see it until she opened her eyes herself. They were shut now, and she was going through the moves they had been taught over and over again. They fit her. They had never fit him.

So he waited. He had resolved to wait. And the rest of them escaped again.

..

“You have to go back,” he told Aang once they arrived in Ember Island. “To the Eastern Air Temple. You must find a way to master the Avatar State.”

Aang shrugged his shoulders. “It won’t make a difference,” he said bitterly. “It doesn’t matter if I can access the Avatar State or not. I won’t kill him.”

“Then how else are you going to bring balance to the world? How else are you going to bring peace? Aang,” he lowered his voice, “there is no other way.”

“We’ve already lost our biggest advantage,” Toph chimed in. “We can’t wait for another eclipse. Or, I guess we could. But who knows what Ozai will do before then?”

“Aang,” Katara said, concerned. “We’re all here for you. You won’t have to do it alone.”

The child laughed in response, though it was absent of joy. “Yes, I will,” he said, tears flooding down his cheeks in frustration. “I can’t, though. It’s not right.” He glared up at them. “This is all I have.”

Toph’s voice was unsympathetic. “So what will you do?”

“ _I don’t know,_ ” he said furiously. “None of you understand. _None of you_.”

“We’re trying to, Aang,” Katara said. Her eyes were wide and open, afraid that he would run away again.

He did.

This time, however, Zuko knew that Aang would have to learn to let go, and that learning to let go was something you had to confront yourself rather than having it granted upon you. So he pulled Katara by the hand toward his childhood home, feeling her erratic heartbeat through her wrist, and hoped that was enough. It had been enough for him.

..

They waited. Aang did not come. They waited some more.

“Did you know?” Katara raised her eyes to the sky. The sun was beginning to set. “Aang kissed me.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. “When?”

She sighed, adjusting the blanket beneath her with anxious fingers. The beach was warmer this time of day, the sand softer. “Before the invasion.”

“Oh.” He still was at a loss. “Well, I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. He asked to talk to me in private. And then, he just —” she struggled to finish the sentence. “Kissed me.”

He turned on his side to study her profile. Her lips were set in a tight line. “What are you going to do?”

She looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“Do you… did you kiss him back?” he asked, feeling distinctly uncomfortable. He did not know why she was telling him this.

She brushed her hand against her mouth, as if trying to remember. “I don’t know. It happened so quickly. And then he ran away.”

“But did you like it? Do you want him to do it again?”

She tensed, this time seeming as uncomfortable as him, her expression conflicted. “I don’t know why it matters,” she muttered.

He stared at her. “Why _wouldn’t_ it matter?”

She shrugged. “Forget it,” she said. “I don’t know why I brought it up in the first place.”

He shook his head. “You brought it up because you wanted to talk about it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have said anything.”

Katara avoided his eyes, and said nothing. Then, as if summoning all her bravery, she said at last, “I’m afraid that _I’m_ the reason he can’t bring an end to it. I’m afraid it’s my fault for what happened on the day of the Eclipse.”

He sat there for a moment stunned. “That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said Katara.”

“It is?” Her voice was small, unsure.

“Yes, it is,” he said calmly. “Letting go is entirely something within Aang’s control. He will be able to, because I believe he can. You believe he can. We all know he can do it. But he has to do it on his own. And whether or not it is you who he struggles to let go of makes no difference. It’s not your fault at all.”

She brought her knees up to her chest. “He ran away again though,” she said. “I should have followed him. I abandoned him, didn’t I?”

Zuko thought back to the Avatar, to the child within him, that _was_ him, who wanted to run free without the consequences. It made him sad too, filled him with doubt and dread, that what they had to do would stifle that spirit in some way or another. But people would die. Kingdoms would fall. Zuko did not want them to crumble the way he had before.

He leaned forward, tilting her lowered chin up with his hand. “Is this okay?” he asked softly. He tried to ignore the rapid increase in his own temperature. She nodded, her breathing becoming rapid and uneven. “I know you want to endure his pain for him. I know you would go through it all so he won’t have to. I know you would do that for all of us. But you can’t. How else is he to learn? To grow? You can’t baby him forever, Katara. He needs to learn to be his own person too, to make his own mistakes. That’s not abandonment, it’s life. That’s how we go to Death peacefully.”

She met his eyes, a faint pink tinge flowering across her cheeks. “How come you’re still dying then? You know all this, you’ve learned.”

He pulled away. “It took me a long time to learn,” he professed. “No one told me that the way to learn was to trust yourself, to believe in your own worth, until you. Before that, I was just trying to learn by someone else’s mistakes.”

The pink grew darker. “It will all be okay right?”

He was trying to convince himself of that still. “Of course,” he said, more confident than he felt.

It was worth it when he noticed the tightness in her shoulders slowly fade.

..

It was worth it again when Aang returned.

He did not tell them where he went, and a sadness had drowned out the light in his eyes, but he did not run away when they asked him if he knew what he had to do. He merely said yes. He did not look at Katara at all.

Later, he would learn the rest. He would learn that Aang had eventually gone to the Eastern Air Temple, that he had stayed up for three nights trying to master the Avatar State. He would learn that the child had let Katara go, and in exchange, liberated the world as they knew it.

He learned that he had been right, that they all had grown up too fast, that what they were was some variation of a lost innocence.

..

They fought Azula as the sky turned to ash.

When he leapt in front of her, felt the electricity bleed into his veins, carve out the last of all the wounds everyone else had already made, he did so without thinking. It came instinctively, as naturally as the sun falls to rise again, as much himself as the kind of person he realized he might be.

On the ground of a once forbidden land, he let himself die for the second time. But it was no death, not as quick fingers brushed against his chest, uncovering layers and layers of heat, of lightning, of lives atop lives, clustered together for the illusion of safety. He was saved, and he had saved.

..

He saw her again. Again, she flitted through his dreams as if a ghost; translucent, blurry, a figment of his imagination. And she said, “I’ve known all this time, have you?”

“What have you known?” The words came out hushed.

She smiled. “Where we are.” She paused. “You have some time left. Live it. I think I’ve been waiting centuries.”

His throat closed up. “You waited for me?”

She looked back into the blue haze of another world, and then faced him again. “Everyone’s been waiting for you.”

..

And he woke again.

**III. Sky / Marriage**

They lay a crown upon his head the moment he recovered his consciousness. He tried not to think of all the things that could go wrong, everything that had unfolded the last time he had even dared to become Fire Lord.

Zuko clutched the gold headpiece between cold fingers as the night lightened to day, fighting the urge to fling it across the room. It was strange, how much he wanted it. How much he positively feared it.

The ornamental robes were suffocating, hot, but they fit him well. He did not feel like someone else in another’s body. He wondered where his friends were, the people who had adopted him as their own. He wondered where his sister was, and what he would do with her once he could stomach the thought of ever seeing her again. He wondered if he should find his mother, if she even wanted to be found.

He wondered, if this time things would go right.

“How do you feel?” Her voice was the exact same as it had been in the dream, but when he turned to greet her, she was whole, dimensional, _real_. He could run a hand across her cheek and it would be warm. He would be able to feel the pulse of her heartbeat if he laid a hand on the nape of her neck. He did not do either of those things.

“I feel fine.”

Katara laughed. “Only fine? This is a big deal, though I guess you know that more than I do.”

“Yeah,” he trailed off. “I guess I do.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He blinked at her. “I’m just worried, that’s all. I don’t want to mess anything up.”

She tilted her head. “Why would you mess something up?”

Zuko shrugged. “It’s just something I tend to do.”

“Well, it’s not going to happen here,” she said, defiant. “You’re going to be the best Fire Lord the Fire Nation has ever seen.”

He smiled weakly, wondering again at her faith in him. “Are you going to stay?”

“Here?”

He nodded.

She studied him, uncharacteristically shy. “If you want me to.”

“I do,” he said firmly.

Her lips curled into a smile, so very pretty it hurt. “Alright. I will.”

..

She said yes when he asked her years later.

He fancied that they were rather happy.

..

When they boarded the procession meant for the smaller Fire Nation villages his ministers had convinced him needed a royal visit, he felt his heart thud in his chest when he realized it would be the last time they would leave the palace as an unmarried couple.

The fire lily a commoner child had given Katara burned bright red from where it was tucked into her hair. He hoped it would never wilt.

The village they passed through first was small and peaceful, inhabited mostly by elders. Though he had never been to it before, it reminded him of the village in which he had grown up in his second life. So much was the same; the forlorn rusted houses with their triangular crimson roofs, the emptiness of the landscape that stretched from one end of the sky to the next, the path of green that swept up into arching mountains larger than the eye could fathom. He could grow old here, he thought. Perhaps, someday he would.

He was prevented from lingering too long as the train began to move again, townspeople crowding around the carriage with curious looks. Some of them openly stared at Katara, at her dark skin and her blue eyes and the necklace hung low around her throat. They stared at him too, with less hostility, as if a scar was something they were more comfortable confronting than a foreigner.

Zuko tried his best to wave, to nod, to shake hands. He took note of their calloused fingers, their wide-brimmed straw hats that seemed to be falling apart. He took note of their poverty, and the prideful faces that aimed to hide such indignity. He knew how much of the Fire Nation was in the way they spoke, how much damage war had done to the fumes ever-present in the sky.

Most of all, he was sorry. He was sorry he had not found a way to be a good enough lord as of yet. He was sorry he had been so invested in what he was afraid of, what he wanted, that he had not thought enough of what the world needed. Peace was almost a drug.

When the last of the commoners had said their piece, he turned back to Katara sitting beside him. It was only then that he realized she had gone perfectly still. She felt perfectly cold to the touch.

“What’s wrong?” He followed the direction of where her eyes had fallen with fear beginning to kindle within him.

She was gazing at an old, weathered man hunched over with a scowl painted on his face. He stood near a vegetable stand, as if he had come to the marketplace for food and then found himself in the midst of a royal gathering. He glared back at them with cruel eyes.

A chill ran down his spine. “Katara,” he said urgently. “What is it? Who is he?’

She did not seem to register his voice. “Katara, please.”

She spoke as if she was miles away. “He’s the man who killed my mother.”

His heartbeat quickened. He signaled for the procession to stop. “What do you want to do?” he said quietly. At that moment, he knew he would do anything she asked of him.

Her hands were trembling. He tried to bring the life back to them by enveloping them with his own.

“I want to go after him,” she said, steady. She was almost too calm.

“Okay,” he said, “that’s what we’ll do.”

The man was still standing there, staring. He did not move.

Zuko pushed open the low-hung door and waited for Katara to step out. The moment she did, the man seemed to realize what was going to happen and turned sharply, running up the hill.

They pursued him, the carriage disappearing from memory and their surroundings becoming muddy with rain as it began to fall from the sky in torrents. It felt like something from a childhood story his mother would tell when he could not fall asleep.

The man moved quickly, but Katara was faster, a rage overtaking her that he had never seen before. It seemed to burn inside her, swallowing her up even as the droplets of water tried to remind her of where she came from. She caught him with her ice, jailed him inside a prison of her own creation. Zuko could see the tears that had wandered too far from her eyes until they spilled into the rain.

His robes were drenched but he could not feel the dampness. There was only Katara, the man, and himself as time petered to a stop.

“You know who I am, don’t you?” Her words came out shaky, unhinged, and yet Zuko knew she was in control. Somehow, without asking her, he knew this was what she had been waiting for all her life.

The man said nothing. And then suddenly his eyes began to bulge out of their sockets, and all the blood drained from his face. For one brief second, Zuko thought he was dead.

“Who am I?” she asked again. This time, it was stronger, fiercer. The rain made her into a whirlwind, a storm that could wage war for however long it took for justice to return again.

The man gaped at her with dazed eyes. The invisible noose around his neck seemed to loosen before he whispered, “The Water Tribe girl. The daughter of the waterbender.”

“You killed her.”

The man stayed quiet.

“Say it,” Katara demanded. “Admit it. _Confess_ it. You killed her.”

“I killed her,” he repeated. The fear with which he said it did not abate.

“But you didn’t kill me.”

“No,” the man said. “You ran away.”

She wanted to kill him, Zuko could tell. The guilt at her mother’s death seemed to open up a chasm of suppressed grief that she had only showed him bits and pieces of until then. The rain froze as it fell, and then it was shivering as it dangled in front of the murderer’s terror-stricken face. The points were whittled down to a sharpness Zuko could tell would pierce any organ, massacre any evil.

He could see the entire vision as if it were a painting in a picture book, instilled in one frame of time. He did not move.

With a cry, Katara let down her hands, and the ice melted to water, dripping to the ground until it blended into rain. She turned away. “Go.”

The man scurried away, a pathetic gray rat in the distance.

It was then that Katara fell.

He held her again.

..

The top of the tallest mountain in the village was where the rain was the most gentle, and so Zuko took her there and they lay along the edge, eyes lifted up to the sky. She did not cry, but her mouth was twisted into a grimace and she refused to look at him.

The silence went on unbroken. He could feel himself falling asleep, the grass plush against his back.

“I love the rain.”

He glanced at her. “You do?”

She nodded, dark hair splayed out like a curtain around her head. “Yeah. It’s comforting.”

“I suppose it is.” He scrutinized the droplets that fell on his face, trying to find the same meaning in them as she did.

She took a deep breath. “I was afraid to say yes,” she said.

“You can still say no.” The thought of it stung, though he said nothing more.

She took his hand in hers. “Not like that, I didn’t mean it like that.” Katara paused. “I meant it like, there was still some part of me that associated you with — with _that_ man.”

“Because we’re both from the Fire Nation? Because what he did was probably under my father’s orders?”

“Yes.”

He craned his neck to meet her eyes. “If you had told me, I would have waited.”

“Until when?”

“Until you were ready,” he said. “Until you were sure.”

“I was,” she said defensively.

“No, you weren’t.”

She opened her mouth as if to argue, but some kind of realization dawned in her eyes and she closed it.

“I don’t want you to do something you feel you _have_ to do. Not to please me, or our friends, or the world,” he continued.

Her eyes began to fill with tears again. “Thank you,” she said. Color seemed to return to her face. Genuine tranquility, too. “I did want you though. I still want you.”

Hope flared in his chest. “Really?”

Katara smiled. “Yeah. I think I was just waiting for all this to happen. I think I knew it would.”

He kissed her. She kissed him back.

..

They married in two places. One was heaven, and the other he supposed was hell. It had to be done.

Their marriage in the Fire Nation was bold and bright. It hurt his eyes to remember it. There was the sun, shot bright against the sky, its light scattering over Katara’s dress in diamonds and frames, the glare of its brilliance imprinted on the dark shadows of their hair. He had wanted to vanish it away, pledge his life to her in cool darkness where he could look at her face without having to squint.

His ministers had waved that idea away before it had even been sprung. They waved away any idea that wasn’t rigidly traditional, that didn’t adhere to the exact way in which the weddings of his forefathers had been performed. It had to be done. It had to be done so he could wake up to her face in the morning, the muse of a painting swathed in crimson. It had to be done so he could feel her beside him as he went to work, her eyes darting across every page and document, pointing out what she thought of each new proposal. It had to be done so he could love her in peace.

So he married her in Caldera, with the pale faces of his people watching him, with the memory of a marriage long gone where he had once been so afraid he had collapsed the next time he had gone onstage. He took her hand in his, felt the warmth of her palm, and said the words. He smiled even in the heat, laughter creasing the corners of his eyes and all the places she would inspire with her touch later on.

..

He loved the Southern Water Tribe even as he fell into the freezing water one fine morning on the day he wed Katara. He loved it in the winter, when the nights were so cold he barely remembered to breathe. He loved it in the summer, when he could pelt snow at Katara and feel the sun as a kindred spirit atop his shoulder rather than a nuisance to hide from. He loved it when light stretched behind every house, and when darkness prevailed as the god of all skies. He loved it because he loved her. He loved it because it _was_ her.

Their marriage in the Southern Water Tribe was not a spectacle. It was quiet, unassuming. He kissed her at the edge of the known universe, counting the stars that reflected in her eyes. He watched as the glow of the lanterns brought him back to that time in space, that one moment when it all changed. He thought of his life and of love.

He reached up to touch the sky, her fingers laced in his.

..

When the snow came, when it came in torrents and showers, in his eyes and in his dreams, he held her close. He felt the brunt of its weight and endured. He was ready to die. He could now.

It would ache bitter and true, but it was the kind of ache he could live with, the kind of ache he could die by.

It did not come.

He lived, in that den of snow in the middle of a white-topped landscape, lost from all contact with his lips turning blue and his heart slowing to a drop. He lived with Katara sheltered against his chest, their bodies a defiance against the sky and the spirits.

Or rather, a reckoning from the sky and the spirits. A result of all that he had lived already. Perhaps, it was even a commendation. Perhaps it was nothing more than a postponement.

..

And he woke again.

**IV. Fire / Death**

They had children, and they grew old. They had children, and they tasted happiness. They had children and their children had children.

He had a family now, a proper one. He could hold them and not worry about how long he had before they were gone, what would happen if they ever abandoned him. He made a home where he never felt alone.

He visited Azula daily now in her own wing of the palace where she frowned less and seemed to smile more. She still said things that were mean or cruel, but they had less of a bite. He did not know if it was he who had changed, or her, or both of them. He had remembered her though, remembered the promise he had made before his uncle on the day of the Eclipse.

She liked his children best, and despite all the remarks his ministers made about leaving his heirs in the company of someone _dangerous_ , he did it nonetheless. He had wanted for so long to trust anyone, and now he did. The panic, the death that had filled his previous lives had numbed until he no longer felt it at all.

He did not think about his father and he did not visit him. Tragedies could be retold, rewritten, but monsters could not. He only made sure Ozai received adequate care in a cell he knew not to remember the number of for fear the temptation would be too strong.

His life was passing, and for once, he did not think he knew the end.

..

It came without violence. So much of his lives had been intertwined in such violence, but this time it was nothing more than a slow decay of his heart. It had been so used to beating erratically, to channeling adrenaline through his blood so he could survive for one life more, one memory less, that it found it hard to adjust to the life he led now.

It came slowly, and for that he was grateful. He hid it well, remembered how he had hid so much as a young boy. He wrote letters, he signed reforms, he dreamed. He lit fires wherever he went because the cold now reached him more easily than ever, and he gazed into the flames as they danced and swayed.

He wanted to play music for those flames, so that they knew they were not alone. He wanted them to dance and dance and dance without the fear of burning out. Without music, they always seemed to die faster. He wondered if his existence could now become some sort of melody, with enough high and low notes to keep the song going. Would singers be able to hum it when the festivals began again? Would that be how he was remembered?

..

He told Azula when he felt his days waning, and she did not laugh. She studied him with careful eyes and said, “She doesn’t know.”

“No.”

His sister arched an eyebrow. “Why not?”

“I want the pain to come and go as quickly as possible.” It was the most honest thing he had ever said to her.

She shook her head. “That’s not going to help.”

He jutted his chin out in defiance. They were children again. “I think it will.”

“It won’t,” Azula said, confident. “Pain lingers. If you tell her right before it happens, it will remain with her for longer. You can’t control pain. You can’t control how quickly it can go.” She leveled him with a patronizing look. “Tell her. She will hate you more if you do not.”

“You’re not sad?”

She seemed amused. “About your impending death?”

Zuko nodded.

“No,” she said. “I think you of all people have lived long enough.”

..

He did not follow Azula’s advice. The day of his death dawned the sunset of a thousand rays of gold on pink on orange. It was the first sunset he had seen in this life, and he thought it fitting that it would be the last as well.

He gripped her hand, pulse weakening as he stared out into the horizon. The palace was far behind them, forgotten to the world. Before him stood nothing but a line of fire, glittering in the wind. He could not tell if they were real, if Katara even saw them as he did.

“Do you know?” he asked, recognizing himself in the sparks. “I loved you very much. Truly, I did.”

He dropped a hand into the flames. He felt himself fall.

She looked stricken, those blue eyes that haunted him in his sleep, in every waking hour, shuddering with all the grief and despair of Oma when she learned her darling Shu had perished. They haunted him even when she was beside him. They would haunt him again, wherever he would go after all this.

A vague trembling of eyelashes, of limp fingers on crimson. She knew now. It had dawned on her.

“I think I am ready to die,” he said. “I think I am ready now. In fact, I think I have been ready since I met you.”

He raised a weak hand, the other still burning, to caress her cheek. “Perhaps, I will see you again, in another life.”

“In another life,” she echoed. And the first tear winked against the sun as his eyes fell shut and his breathing ceased. _And what of all the ones we have already lived?_

The sun, the sun. He melted away into the sun. He sprang from the green and into the air. Fell into that alignment of stars he never could see until she carved herself into his sight and showed him the way.

..

He did not wake again.

**V. The End**

Her hands were shriveled now, deep lines embedded into brown skin. She remembered when she could run as fast as airbenders could fly, when power thrummed in her veins and the only thing holding her back was her immense fear.

She was old now, a remnant of the past. The world had gone on without her, and would continue to do so. That was how it worked, how time worked, how life spun.

Katara swept her gaze from where Zuko’s slab of grey lay in that great field swathed in golden light and let out a sigh. Her bones were aching, and the wind would return.

She would, too. She had come back; to this life, from another. To another, from the one she had dreamt.

She could see them all now, lined up before her in an endless display of color, just like they had when he had died, and let herself fall into the last with an openness she only now came to see as death.

..

_You waited._

_A smile. Gold._

_There’s not much else to do when you love._


End file.
